Pantheist Visions by Laura Read
Tahoe Quarterly, Spring 2003.


It's a cool summer morning in the mountains above Hope Valley and Phyllis Shafer is walking with an easel, canvas and paints slung on her back. As she steps along the granite-strewn path, her eyes are on the distant Hawkins Peak. She rounds a clutch of boulders and finds her goal - Red Lake - a place she's visited four times already this season with her paints.

The lake pools in the bottom of a cup-like recession in the mountainside. Around the cup are elements of nature that have been swirling in Shafer's imagination for weeks - trees, rocks, clouds, shrubs, patches of open hillside. She sets down her easel, gets out her brushes and paints and adds to the rough scene she's applied to the canvas during previous sessions.

"I search for these spots," she says, "a bowl shape in the landscape and this cyclical energy within it - a rhythmic undulation throughout the natural forms. When I got up on the rock and saw the shape of the lake, and the rhythm of the growth around it, that captured me."

Once Shafer paints the rough composition in the field, she'll put the canvas on her studio easel and begin the long work of completing the painting. It could take a year or more to get it exactly right.

"I'm not looking to create something that has a series of characters," she says, "some kind of plot, not in a literary sense, more in a visual sense. I know when it's not there, and I know when it is."

When the painting is finished, it will go to an exhibit somewhere, or to Reno's Stremmel Gallery, which handles her work. And probably before it spends too much time on the wall, it will go the way of the rest of Shafer's recent oils and gouaches: in to the hands of a private collector, a corporate collection or a museum.

"She's one of the strongest landscape artists in the region," says Nevada Museum of Art curator Diane Demming. "She's obviously had a strong historical training and has knowledge of some of the American regionalist painters. She is challenging herself to look at nature, not just in a documentary way, but in a poetic way."

Demming is not along in her enthusiasm. According to gallery owner Turkey Stremmel, there's been a flurry of regional interest in Shafer's work. Last year, Shafer was the first artist selected to paint one of 25 big sheep sculptures for the Reno Artown exhibition, Counting Sheep. The City of Reno bought the piece and has it on display at the McKinley Park Arts and Culture Center. Since moving to the area in 1994, Shafer has had five solo shows and seven group shows, including exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art and the Crocker Museum in Sacramento. In 2004, Stremmel will hold a solo show of Shafer's work.

Shafer's interesting use of perspective is one of her most exciting strengths. "I force the exaggerated perspective to heighten the contrast between the microcosm and the macrocosm," she explains. "I'm standing out there looking at the mules ear plants at my feet and the vista in the distance, and I see the rhythms in both. I'm merging the intimate with the grandiose."

Shafer paintings are reminiscent of the work of American regionalists landscape painters of the early twentieth century, particularly Thomas Hart Benton. She also cites the early American modernist painters, associated with the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery in New York, as important influences. But Shafer is particularly interested in early twentieth century Canadian artists, including a cluster of landscape painters called the Group of Seven, and the eccentric painter Emily Carr.

"Emily Carr talked about sitting in one place and seeing everything, from the new bud to the dying leaf, to get a sense of the trajectory of life," Shafer says. "We are all somewhere on that path."

Until nine years ago, Shafer's path existed in an urban landscape. She was working various full-time jobs in San Francisco, teaching part-time and painting whenever she could. Between 1983 and 1993, she was featured in six solo exhibition and eleven group shows. Realizing that she loved to teach and was good at it, she started looking for a full-time teaching job. When Lake Tahoe Community College asked her to become its studio art and art history instructor, she packed up her easels and moved to South Lake Tahoe.

"I thought, 'I'll do it for two years and get another line on the resume, then move back to the city," she says. "But then I realized it had been ten years since I'd been in nature. I'd been living in ghetto - New York first, then Oakland - and I grew up in upstate New York near Buffalo. Obviously, I fell in love with this area, and everything fell into place."

As she adjusted to her new life and job, she had little time to paint, and her production diminished. Then, as she became familiar with her surroundings and spent more time outdoors, and new painting style evolved.

In the Bay Area she was known for her expressionistic interpretations of extremely up-close patterns in nature, for instate of a knothole in a tree view as closely as if it were under a microscope.

"When I moved up here, I started doing really straight, realist landscape paintings," she says. "I needed to look at this landscape and paint it as realistically as I could to being to understand it."

When working out of doors, she enjoys the challenge of painting quickly to capture the fleeting qualities of light. "There are so many things about plein-air (in the open air) painting," she says. "You've got so much to consider - the wind, the sun, the bugs, whether or not you can carry your stuff to the spot, where you can park, wondering if anyone will bother you. So when I go out trolling, I'm looking for (it all) to click."

What often clicks for Shafer is a view composed of land features that create an enveloped, circular space. Her interest in this composition budded when she studied the pottery of an ancient native South American culture.

"The Mimbres had a belief that when you were born, you would come through a hole in the earth, and when you died you would go through a hole in the sky," she explains. "They buried their dead in a fetal position, with a bowl stacked on the skull... and a hole punctured through it to release the spirit of this world."

The landscape of the Tahoe Sierra, especially around Hope Valley, has presented her with many locations where she recognizes this stimulation pattern.

"A lot of people who buy my work have spent time out there," she says, "and they know how it feels. It's pantheistic. It's like God in nature. When I'm sitting out there, I can feel it... I feel free. I guess that's why we live in the mountains.

Shafer now paints all summer long and within guarded chunks of time during the school year. When discussing the persnickety temperament of creativity, she describes how sometimes people need a straight shot, an uncluttered avenue down which to guide their inspiration. Shafer has found her straight shots across the grand, enveloping views of the Sierra.


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